Anti-Climacus

ALL GOOD POLITICAL THEORISTS: And those interested in political theory more generally, should be at Jacob Levy's blog this week. He's hosting a symposium on Nancy Rosenblum's new book On the Side of Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship. An obligation to the Ethics Colloquium here has limited my time in following it all, but it begins here with Levy's introduction, and proceeds up through the rest of the blog. The list of contributors is impressive, and the topic of the book looks good--I'll be popping up in the comments later on in the week, I hope.

Along with the symposium, it's also worth spending time with his post asking Of What Is Political Theory a Subset? It's unusual to think of oneself as "at home" in a political science department, through some combination of the direction taken by political science as a whole and the uncertainty of what exactly it is that political theorists are supposed to do. The strongest pull for most is to philosophy, which has the kind of rigor (if you're analytic) or flexibility (if you're continental) to which theorists sometimes seem to aspire. Among the grad students here at Duke, I'd say the strongest pull is to English or Literature (in part because the interests of the Literature and English programs have strong political theory dimensions), though I know people for whom the answer would be History or other possibilities.

I'm with Levy in his commitment, which is to say that the departmental affiliation of political theorists is no accident: theory always turns back to questions concerning how the world already is. Some of these questions are best given to those who do more empirical work, but many of them belong to the theorists. As any good social scientist will tell you (it's important to take them seriously when they say this, because they often do not follow through), all the data in the world is useless without good theory--and the theory needs to come first.

There's more to say about it, but I'm left with one question: why should we think of political theory as a subset of anything? One can ask the question, in a productive way, of what literatures, approaches, figures a political theorist most needs to engage. To ask "of what is political theory a subset?" frames the question in a way it can respond directly to the post-Rawls contention that political theory is a subset of moral philosophy or ethics, but it also presumes that the hierarchy involved is the correct way to think of these things: it's not clear to me that's right.